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5 Best Tips for Organizing a Bath for Space and Efficiency

Organization can optimize any area in the home, from the closets to the baths. This week, let’s take a peak into the 5 best strategies, tips, and steps to maximizing space in your full bath – no matter how small it is, or how many people need to use it.

1. Organize the Tub and Shower

It may be true that while Dad needs a dandruff shampoo and Mom likes a specific conditioner with her very specific shampoo, a daughter might still prefer her 3-in-1 while a son wants the popular stuff with the scents that waft off all the “cool kids”. Baby might require three rubber duckies and a plastic diver to boot, and now we’re talking about quite a lot of items for the ledges and soap dish alone. But before each washing becomes a symphony of different bottles sliding off the edges and hitting the shower floor, let’s talk storage solutions.

Shower caddies are one great solution and come in a variety of sizes and shapes to attach and accommodate all types of showers and baths. Here’s our tip. Don’t go with suction cups as your preferred form of adhesion. We’re trying to get away for the shower symphony of falling objects, remember? While suctions might be a great solution in your car for you GPS or radar detector, the dampness, humidity and other unique environmental factors present in your shower or bath make them less than ideal.

If you want to give a DIY solution a shot, try adding an old shower curtain to the back wall with hooks for loofahs and caddies. As always, it’s just a matter of getting creative, tweaking, and starting over when things don’t work.

2. The Super Simple Solutions for More Space in the Shower

This one is a two-parter and it’s about having more space to bath, and so having more comfort.

First, understand that light colors always open up a space, and that goes for shower curtains as well. If it’s a dark color and you feel like you’re showering in a small, enclosed space, switch to white and see if your morning doesn’t start out bright and airy – that’s a pretty good change for not a lot of effort.

Second, give a curved shower curtain a shot. It may give you that extra space you were looking for so you can really spread your elbows during those dramatic shampoos that are usually only seen on TV.

3. Bathroom Closets, Vanity Storage and Out-of-the-Way Places

It’s time to get rid of the non-essentials including perhaps 10,000 sample-sized guest shampoos reclaimed from hotel rooms that nobody uses, ancient bath toys the teenagers used a decade ago, cleaning products that are nearly empty, expired, or taking up space, etc. Like all the spaces, the bathroom needs that organizing care. Once you’ve successfully pared down to the bare essentials, considering storage containers, storage bins, closet organizers or, at the very least, a carefully thought-out strategy for keeping everything both neat and accessible.

4. Shelves, Shelving, and Hooks – Organization System 101

We’ve only got so much surface area in any room to work with, right? Wrong. Shelves come in so many varieties, shapes, and sizes to fit the different demands of your life and home that you don’t even have to pull that old bookshelf in from the garage.

Consider the function when you’re considering the form. Is a shelf going to hold smaller, lighter items like toiletries and perfumes for her. Then why not install a small decorative shelf? Is a shelf going to be where the teens slam down their toothbrushes on the way to jumping a wide arch into their beds. Then here we would recommend something a little more sturdy, and maybe even lower for access by younger bathroom users.

Hooks can and should be incorporated for needs just like shelves. Brushes should either go in a drawer or on a hook. The sink and countertop is not the place for things that don’t seem to fit anywhere else, because if you’re not making designated spaces for things anywhere else, your counter-top is going to fill up very quickly.

5. Put on Your Inspiration Goggles

Remember, it’s exceedingly rare that the wheel has to be reinvented. People have been dealing with bathrooms that they wish were larger for generations. And they succeed in this task all the time. Be vigilant and attentive in friends’ bathrooms and see how their space is organized, ask yourself what works and what doesn’t, what things you would change, and what things you might incorporate.

Hotels and restaurants are pros at working effectively with different space and size requirements, take notes of the things that the professional decorators are doing with those bathrooms. Maybe go wash-up even if you don’t need to, just to look around. Eventually, you’ll gain a sense of best practices and your own likes, wants, and needs. Then it’s going to be easy and fun.